The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Scorecard can help you determine how your company’s social media maturity benchmarks to other companies. While the result can be boiled down to a single number, the real value is in understanding the components that feed into that number.

There is plenty of published research that shows high numbers of business adoption of social media, but that usually focuses on external social media activities. A company starts a Twitter account or a Facebook Page and they can check the box that they have adopted social media to connect with their customers. Even if we ignore the fact that many of these companies still don’t understand what to publish on these channels, this is not social media adoption.

Social media adoption is about how companies organize their internal structures to support their external social media activities. You can’t start a Twitter account without realizing that customers will send you support questions. This means creating workflows for routing these questions and training your support agents to respond using social media. You must keep in mind how you can track these activities to report on your success in meeting business goals. And these need to be real goals, not vanity metrics like followers and fans.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Media Model examines nine categories of social media adoption and provides four stages of maturity for each one of them. The categories are:

• Ideology and Leadership
• Staffing
• Internal Education
• Social Listening
• Engagement and Community
• Social Content
• Social Advertising
• Measurement and Analytics
• Social Media Tools

Learn more about your own company’s social media maturity and how it compares to other companies by downloading the ebook: Follow the Social Media Maturity to Become a Social Business.